Much ado about Eliza

Was a Sydney recluse the 'real' Miss Havisham, or simply an eccentric lost soul?

By Reviewed By Kerryn Goldsworthy

22 September 2012 — 3:00am

Say ''Miss Havisham'' and even someone who hasn't read Great Expectations or seen a screen version of that Dickens classic still might know who you mean: an image will rise of the jilted bride in her tattered gown and veil, glaring from her seat at the table where the ruins of her wedding feast still provide pickings for tiny creatures, and the unlit chandelier overhead is festooned with spiderwebs and dust.

Less well known is the story, much disputed and told with many variations, that there was a real-life model for the character of Miss Havisham: a colonial Sydney woman called Eliza Donnithorne, who lived a reclusive life in a Newtown house named Camperdown Lodge.

She is buried alongside her father in Camperdown Cemetery, and it is here that Evelyn Juers chooses to begin the story told in her strange and beautiful little book, which she calls a biographical essay.

As a young student Juers would sometimes cut classes and head to the cemetery, where she would find a pleasant spot to read. This is where she first read Great Expectations, the plot of which she recounts briefly, and then summarises in a sentence that typifies the subtlety and charm of her own writing: ''Pirouettes of fortune link up the characters' nastinesses, genialities, and genealogies.''

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The Recluse by Evelyn Juers

This lovely sentence is also true of Alan Wardrope's Lost Expectations, the best thing about it being his adroit assembly of narrative links as he picks and chooses details from the many facts, rumours, exaggerations and inventions that swirl around the figure of Eliza Donnithorne.

The book's back cover calls it historical fiction but, in fact, Wardrope invents very little while piecing together a racy melodramatic plot that shows his wealth of experience in the film industry but also, alas, his lack of experience as a fiction writer.

The galloping story does not make up for the wooden, cliche-ridden style and the lack of any genuinely imaginative insight into the material.

Juers's purpose, in contrast, is not to cobble together a racy narrative out of fragments of fact and rumour that best suit the purpose, but rather to clear away this material to make room for documented facts, which she then digs deep to find.

The result is a kind of anti-narrative; a story that branches off in all directions: suppositions are squashed, legends debunked, theories disproved and cul-de-sacs cheerfully explored. She finds there is no evidence of the intended wedding, there is significant uncertainty about the date and there is no evidence of the groom's identity.

Eliza, she concludes, was probably just a recluse by temperament, a lover of books and animals who was neither psychologically disturbed nor fully cut off from the world.

Using an extraordinary assortment of sources, Juers assembles the facts of Eliza's life. Among other things, she puts it in the context of the lives and work of Dickens, Charles Darwin and other Victorian luminaries; she sketches a history of reading and bookselling in Sydney at the time, and gives the dates and places of the births, deaths and marriages of some minor players in the drama.

This is so different from the way traditional biography seeks to stitch together the fragments and smooth over the bumps in the story of a life that it leaves the reader wondering where Juers is going with it, but eventually all is explained: she sees her project as a collection, which is itself a very Victorian activity.

''It's in this spirit that I have gathered and investigated and imagined Eliza's history … biography as vastness, minuteness, contiguity.'' It is, she says, ''a form of Wunderkammer'', a cabinet of curiosities.

The commentary on her discoveries is leavened with quiet, understated humour, as when she describes the accounts of the household in Eliza's youth: ''Their butchers' bills are not reading matter for the faint-hearted.''

It is clear that Juers is all too aware of the heavily gendered nature of this story in all its variations, and of the way its imaginative power in Great Expectations and its persistence in Sydney tales go on reasserting the importance of marriage in women's lives.

It is equally clear that she well knows how some readers wilfully assume a simple correlation between fiction and real life, and are always determined to find one, rather than understanding the motley assortment of small details, scraps, dream images, old stories and new ideas from which most fiction writers assemble their characters and plots.

These things are not argued overtly, but they are implicit in her delicately forensic exploration of the facts.